Uploaded July 2015 | Updated September 2026, 2 hours ago
This story was set to air on Superbowl Sunday, in the middle of February sweeps 2006.
I shot some of my own material for this one, as the script talked about a roll of the dice…and no such footage existed and we were running out of time to go and get it. So I set up a shot at home and shot my own footage with my miniDV camera, rolling a couple of dice from a Monopoly game right into the camera lens (or, more accurately, right into the plexiglass that was set up in front of it). Hopefully it looks more like a craps table than a crap table.
A NOTE ABOUT VIDEO QUALITY
I began archiving my work-related video years before YouTube existed. It was an age of darkness, an age of limited web storage, an age of... {shudder} ...dial-up connections.
More to the point, my work archive at my site was all dependent on... {shudder some more} ...Adobe Flash. These videos were converted, usually from either the master MII or Beta tapes or from VHS dubs, with a program called Sorenson Squeeze. Sorenson is great for what it does, but with scenes featuring a lot of motion, there's often a lot of pixellation and motion artifacting that's considered unacceptable these days. The Sorenson files were also generated at a very small resolution, and thus the video extracted from them could only be the same resolution. (I no longer work at any of the TV stations for whom I produced these spots, and as such no longer have access to the master tapes.)
I hope you enjoy this little walk down local TV memory lane.
This story was set to air on Superbowl Sunday, in the middle of February sweeps 2006.
I shot some of my own material for this one, as the script talked about a roll of the dice…and no such footage existed and we were running out of time to go and get it. So I set up a shot at home and shot my own footage with my miniDV camera, rolling a couple of dice from a Monopoly game right into the camera lens (or, more accurately, right into the plexiglass that was set up in front of it). Hopefully it looks more like a craps table than a crap table.
A NOTE ABOUT VIDEO QUALITY
I began archiving my work-related video years before YouTube existed. It was an age of darkness, an age of limited web storage, an age of... {shudder} ...dial-up connections.
More to the point, my work archive at my site was all dependent on... {shudder some more} ...Adobe Flash. These videos were converted, usually from either the master MII or Beta tapes or from VHS dubs, with a program called Sorenson Squeeze. Sorenson is great for what it does, but with scenes featuring a lot of motion, there's often a lot of pixellation and motion artifacting that's considered unacceptable these days. The Sorenson files were also generated at a very small resolution, and thus the video extracted from them could only be the same resolution. (I no longer work at any of the TV stations for whom I produced these spots, and as such no longer have access to the master tapes.)
I hope you enjoy this little walk down local TV memory lane.
